Ten Questions for a New Year

The beginning of a new year is is an ideal time to stop, look up, and get your bearings. To that end, Don Whitney provides some questions to ask prayerfully in the presence of God.

1. What’s one thing you could do this year to increase your enjoyment of God?

2. What’s the most humanly impossible thing you will ask God to do this year?

3. What’s the single most important thing you could do to improve the quality of your family life this year?

4. In which spiritual discipline do you most want to make progress this year, and what will you do about it?

5. What is the single biggest time-waster in your life, and what will you do about it this year?

6. What is the most helpful new way you could strengthen your church?

7. For whose salvation will you pray most fervently this year?

8. What’s the most important way you will, by God’s grace, try to make this year different from last year?

9. What one thing could you do to improve your prayer life this year?

10. What single thing that you plan to do this year will matter most in ten years? In eternity?

Don provides some additional questions in the rest his article. I hope pondering these questions will help you start the new year well!

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Five Daily Prayers

Yesterday I preached on a pattern for powerful prayer and presented seven biblical principles that should drive our prayer lives. I mentioned that at the beginning of every day when I seek to meet with God I begin with a series of short petitions to God asking for his divine assistance as I read and pray through the Bible that day. I ask him to incline my heart toward His testimonies, open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in His law, unite my heart to fear His name, and satisfy me in the morning with his steadfast love. Recently I have an incorporated another set of daily prayers that I gleaned from Jon Bloom at Desiring God blog. I commend them to you. He daily prays:

Whatever it takes, Lord, give me…

• Delight in you as the greatest treasure of my heart.Delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)
• Desire to know you, be with you, and seek your kingdom above all else.”Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:25-26).
  
• Discernment that comes from a renewed mind that I might know your will.But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:14)
• Discipline to plan for what I discern as your will.Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. (Ephesians 5:15-16)
• Diligence to do your will with all my heart.You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:5)

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